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<title>Introduction: GNOME Data Access 5 manual</title>
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<div class="chapter">
<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title">
<a name="introduction"></a>Introduction</h2></div></div></div>
<p>
	<a href="http://foldoc.org/ODBC"><span class="acronym">ODBC</span></a> and <a href="http://foldoc.org/SQL"><span class="acronym">SQL</span></a> are established standards. However <a href="http://foldoc.org/ODBC"><span class="acronym">ODBC</span></a> is mostly limited to
	the Microsoft Windows environment (even though the UnixODBC project exists and links
	to some drivers), and the API is quite old and not well integrated into the GNOME ecosystem.
      </p>
<p>
	<a href="http://foldoc.org/SQL"><span class="acronym">SQL</span></a> itself is standardized but up to some point only, so that <a href="http://foldoc.org/SQL"><span class="acronym">SQL</span></a> source
	compatibility can not be assured for all database servers. And for some
	sort of servers, <a href="http://foldoc.org/SQL"><span class="acronym">SQL</span></a> is not even feasible (think about <a href="http://foldoc.org/LDAP"><span class="acronym">LDAP</span></a>).
      </p>
<p>
	<a href="http://foldoc.org/JDBC"><span class="acronym">JDBC</span></a> is a more recent standard which replaces <a href="http://foldoc.org/ODBC"><span class="acronym">ODBC</span></a> in the Java world, but it's limited
	to the Java programming world, and is difficult to integrate in C (or other languages
	different from Java). There are however a lot of JDBC drivers out there for many database
	engines.
      </p>
<p>
	<a href="http://foldoc.org/GDA"><span class="acronym">GDA</span></a> (GNOME Data Access) tries to tackle the <a href="http://foldoc.org/ODBC"><span class="acronym">ODBC</span></a> and <a href="http://foldoc.org/JDBC"><span class="acronym">JDBC</span></a> "limitations" and help you with the <a href="http://foldoc.org/SQL"><span class="acronym">SQL</span></a>
	problem. It's a sort of middleware to access different data sources. It offers a high level view of
	data sources and has some places where you can plug in low level access
	to the database for special tasks.
      </p>
<p>
	It offers a wrapper around the database internals, thus making it easier
	for programmers to make use of all the power provided by many RDBMS without
	knowing much about it. It comes as a set of libraries, a core one and some extensions (the GTK+ UI
	extension for example) and some drivers for the most common OpenSource or proprietary database engines.
      </p>
<p>
	Some of these drivers are a bit special: the LDAP provider allows one to adress an LDAP directory as
	if it were composed of tables (provided some configuration), and the <a href="http://foldoc.org/JDBC"><span class="acronym">JDBC</span></a> provider "wraps" any <a href="http://foldoc.org/JDBC"><span class="acronym">JDBC</span></a> driver.
      </p>
<p>
	Along with these libraries (and associated header files and language 
	bindings for development), <span class="application">Libgda</span> includes several tools and utilities
	to help you with the task of developing applications based on <span class="application">Libgda</span>,
	as well as for automating some database-related tasks.
      </p>
<p>
	<span class="application">Libgda</span> is implemented for <code class="systemitem">UNIX</code>-like operating systems
	(including <code class="systemitem">Linux</code>), and <code class="systemitem">Windows</code>.
      </p>
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